Go Time panelist (and semi-professional unpopular opinion maker) Kris Brandow joins us to discuss his deep-dive on the waterfall paper, his dislike of the “tech debt” analogy, why documentation matters so much & how everything is a distributed system.

This week Alexander Neumann takes Jerod on a tour of Restic, the world-class backup solution that’s fast, secure, and cross-platform. We discuss why he created Restic in the first place, how (and why you should) you use it, some of its more interesting technical bits, lessons learned over the years building and maintaining a community, and more of course.

The Cursor AI code editor raises $60 million, RedMonk’s Rachel Stephens tries to determine if rug pulls are worth it, Caleb Porzio details how he made $1 million on GitHub Sponsors, Elastic founder Shay Banon announces that Elasticsearch is open source (again) & Tomas Stropus writes about the art of finishing.

Hyperswitch is like the adapter pattern for payments, Austin Henley writes about the future of programming by summarizing recent research papers, Thoughtworks published their 28th volume of their Tech Radar, the team at General Products reminds devs to scan our technical writing for words such as “easy”, “painless”, “straightforward”, “trivial”, “simple” and “just” & we finish with a lightning round of cool tools.

We’re talking with Emma Bostian about going from zero to thought leader in 6 months. We talk about the nuances of UX including the differences between an UX Designer and a UX Engineer, we touch on “the great divide”, and we talk about Coding Coach — the open source project and community that Emma and others are building to connect software developers and mentors all over the world.

Mat Ryer is back and he’s brought with him 10 tips to be a 10x developer (like he is). After that, we try a new segment we’re calling “Tool Time” (and try out a few jingles for it along the way). Finally, it’s time to review our previous unpopular opinions and put some new ones into the world for your (dis)agreeing pleasure. Join us for an automagical time!

HashiCorp adopts a Business Source license, Matt Rickard hypothesizes why Tailwind CSS won, WarpStream sets out to make a Kafka-compatible offering directly on S3, Vadim Kravcenko publishes an excellent guide for managing difficult software engineers & Russ Cox gives an update on Go 2.

José Valim joins Jerod to talk all about what’s new in Livebook – the Elixir-based interactive code notebook he’s been working on the last few years.

José made a big bet when he decided to bring machine learning to Elixir. That bet is now paying off with amazing new capabilities such as building and deploying a Whisper-based chat app to Hugging Face in just 15 minutes.

José demoed that and much more during Livebook’s first-ever launch week. Let’s get into it.

Adam and Jerod talk with Angie Byron, a core contributor and staple of the Drupal community. We haven’t covered Drupal really (sorry about that), but the call with Angie was inspiring! From the background, to the tech, the usage of the software, the communication at all levels of the community — Drupal is doing something SO RIGHT, and we’re happy to celebrate with them as they march on to the “Framlication” beat of their own drum.

We’re back in NYC at Microsoft Connect(); talking about the backstory of Visual Studio Code with Julia Liuson (Corporate Vice President of Visual Studio), Chris Dias (Principal Program Manager of Visual Studio and .NET), and PJ Meyer (Product Manager).

We talk about the beginnings of the Visual Studio product line, how Microsoft missed the internet, how the community is judging Microsoft and looking at them with a very old lense, how Visual Studio Code evolved from lessons learned with their cloud based editor called Monaco, how they had to radically change to reach developers beyond Windows, and how this open source project is thriving.

We’re joined by Jim Haughwout (Head of Infrastructure and Operations) and Stefan Ålund (Principal Product Manager) from Spotify to talk about how they manage hundreds of teams producing code and shipping at scale. Thanks to their recently open sourced open platform for building developer portals called Backstage, Spotify is able to keep engineering squads connected and shipping high-quality code quickly — without compromising autonomy.

The dataset wars are heating up, Bark is a transformer-based text-to-audio model that can generate highly realistic, multilingual speech as well as other audio, Kent Beck needs to recalibrate after using ChatGPT, the team behind Stable Diffusion release a new open source language model & Mitchel Hashimoto weighs in on prompt engineering.

This week we’re talking with Ben Johnson. Ben is known for his work on BoltDB, his work in open source, and as a freelance Go developer. Late January when Ben open sourced his newest project Litestream in the readme he shared how the project was open source, but not open for contribution. His reason was to protect his mental health and the long term viability of the project. On this episode we talk with Ben about what that means, his thoughts on mental health and burnout in open source, choosing a license, and the details behind Litestream - a standalone streaming replication tool for SQLite.

Alice Girard Guittard finds out how much she could you really get out of a $4 VPS, Brett Cannon wonders if using TOML for .env files is a good idea, Nic Mulvaney details how they count unique visitors to a website without using cookies, UIDS, or fingerprinting, after a few months, Chris Coyier is still using the Arc browser & Alex Kladov pens a love letter to Deno.

Dalai is the simplest way to run LLaMA on your local machine, simple web tools that just work without annoying you, Wik is a tool to view wikipedia pages from your terminal, Rspack is a fast, Rust-based web bundler, Doodle is a pure Kotlin UI framework, Marqo is tensor search for humans & iLLA is an open source alternative to Retool.

This week we’re talking about Passkeys with Anna Pobletts, Head of Passwordless, at 1Password. Will Passkeys enable a passwordless future? Time will tell. Anna shares the what, the why, how, and the when on Passkeys.

We’re talking with Victor Zhou about the explosion of the .io game genre. We talked through all the details around building and running one of these games, the details behind Victor’s super popular game called Generals — which he eventually sold, and we also covered the economics behind creating and selling one of these games.

Jon Thornton (Engineering Manager at Squarespace) joined the show to talk about tech debt by way of his post to the Squarespace engineering blog titled “3 Kinds of Good Tech Debt”. We talked through the concept of “good tech debt,” how to leverage it, how to manage it, who’s in charge of it, how it’s similar to ways we leverage financial debt, and how Squarespace uses tech debt to drive product development.

Taylor Troesh joins Jerod to discuss a bevy of software development topics: yak shaves, dependency selection, -10x engineers, IKEA-oriented development, his new content-addressable programming language & much more along the way.

Homebrew project leader Mike McQuaid joins us to weigh in on Apple’s big Vision Pro announcement. We also hit on our favorite (and least favorite) non-AR things from the WWDC 2023 keynote.

Christine Yen (co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb) joined the show to talk about her upcoming talk at Strange Loop titled “Observability: Superpowers for Developers.” We talk practically about observability and how it delivers on these superpowers. We also cover the biggest hurdles to observability, the cultural shifts needed in teams to implement observability, and even the gains the entire organization can enjoy when you deliver high-quality code and you’re able to respond to system failure with resilience.

This week we’re celebrating Maintainer Month along with our friends at GitHub. Open source runs the world, but who runs open source? Maintainers. Open source maintainers are behind the software we use everyday, but they don’t always have the community or support they need. That’s why we’re celebrating open source maintainers during the month of May. Today’s conversation features Alyssa Wright (Bloomberg), Chad Whitacre (Sentry), and Duane O’Brien (Creator of the FOSS Contributor Fund and framework). We get into all the details, the why, the hows, and the struggles involved for companies to support open source.

This week Elixir creator José Valim joins Jerod and Practical AI’s Daniel Whitenack to discuss Numerical Elixir, his new project that’s bringing Elixir into the world of machine learning. We discuss why José chose this as his next direction, the team’s layered approach, influences and collaborators on this effort, and their awesome collaborative notebook project that’s built on Phoenix LiveView.

This week we’re talking about the recent falling out between Elastic and AWS around the relicensing of Elasticsearch and Kibana. Like many in the community, we have been watching this very closely.

Here’s the tldr for context. On January 21st, Elastic posted a blog post sharing their concerns with Amazon/AWS misleading and confusing the community, saying “They have been doing things that we think are just NOT OK since 2015 and it has only gotten worse.” This lead them to relicense Elasticsearch and Kibana with a dual license, a proprietary license and the Sever Side Public License (SSPL). AWS responded two days later stating that they are “stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch,” and shared their plans to create and maintain forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana based on the latest ALv2-licensed codebases.

There’s a ton of detail and nuance beneath the surface, so we invited a handful of folks on the show to share their perspective. On today’s show you’ll hear from: Adam Jacob (co-founder and board member of Chef), Heather Meeker (open-source lawyer and the author of the SSPL license), Manish Jain (founder and CTO at Dgraph Labs), Paul Dix (co-founder and CTO at InfluxDB), VM (Vicky) Brasseur (open source & free software business strategist), and Markus Stenqvist (everyday web dev from Sweden).

This week we’re joined by Steve O’Grady, Principal Analyst & Co-founder at RedMonk. The topic today is the definition of open source, the constant pressure on the true definition of the term, and the seemingly small but vocal minority that aim to protect that definition. In Steve’s post Why Open Source Matters, he says “open source is at a crossroads” and there are some seeking to break the definition of open source to one that is more permissive to their desires, and they are closer than ever to achieving that goal. Today’s conversation goes deep on this subject.

Our 7th annual year-end wrap-up is here! We’re featuring 12 listener voicemails, dope Breakmaster Cylinder remixes & our favorite episodes of the year. Thanks for listening! 💚

Dave Kerr joins Jerod to discuss the various laws, theories, principles, and patterns that we developers find useful in our work and life. We unpack Hanlon’s Razor, Gall’s Law, Murphy’s Law, Kernighan’s Law, and too many others to list here.

Jimmy Miller tells us about the best, worst codebase he’s ever seen, The Phylum Research Team follows up on the great npm garbage patch, Zach Leatherman logs his findings on sneaky serverless costs, David Cain wants you to go on quests instead of goals & Ashley Janssen gives us szeven rules for effective meeting culture.

Amal Hussein (Engineering Manager at npm) joined the show to talk about AST’s — aka, abstract syntax trees. Amal is giving a talk at All Things Open on the subject so we asked her to give us an early preview. She’s on a mission to democratize the knowledge and usage of AST’s to push legacy code and the web forward.

This week we’re talking with Jonathan Carter who’s on his fourth term as Debian Project Lead (DPL) and we’re talking about 30 years of Debian!